People Believe NASA Funded As Well As US Military

QuantumG writes "An essay on the Space Review site is reporting that a just-completed study indicates the average citizen has no idea how much funding NASA gets. Respondents generally estimated NASA's allocation of the national budget to be approximately 24% (it's actually closer to 0.58%) and the Department of Defense budget to be approximately 33% (it's actually closer to 21%). In other words, respondents believed NASA's budget approaches that of the Department of Defense, which receives almost 38 times more money. Once informed of the actual allocations, they were almost uniformly surprised. One of the more vocal participants exclaimed, 'No wonder we haven't gone anywhere!'"

Comments

Re:Military budget

[evilviper]

I just can't believe USA people put up with spending 21% of their national budget on the military.

First, before this morphs into yet another uninformed Education vs. Military spending flame-fest, I should mention that's only 21% of the Federal budget. If you included individual state taxes, you'd see it's a much smaller percentage overall.

Also, it's odd that people on slashdot are so quick to encourage massive funding for NASA, because of the technology they develop, yet disparage military spending, which includes a lot of advanced R&D.

And lastly, for better or worse, the US military has been the police force of the world for 60 years, and costs reflect that. The UN doesn't send troops anywhere unless the US volunteers to spend the vast majority of them. No other country has any intention of fielding a blue-water navy, so it's the US Navy that is protecting international trade, even though the vast majority is not going to or from the US. Since the rest of the world isn't paying anything for this service, it has to come out of US Federal taxes.

Strange that this remains the situation today, even though the EU is now economically as large as the US, and has a larger population. It seems only the US is willing to do the hard, thankless work, and the rest of the world is happy to enjoy the benefits, while criticizing everything the US does out the other side of their mouth.